I had a similar question...I've been experiencing the same problems as everyone else on this thread. I've got the Series 3 with OLED with the original 250GB internal and a 1TB Fantom Green Drive (GD1000EU) as an expansion. I tried the SMART test and it couldn't finish on the first drive. I assumed after reading through several threads that Unitron's suggestion to replace the drive according to Lussie/S3-2501 method would work. But how does the expansion drive come into play? I have a spare 2TB WD20EARS AF drive, looking for any advice on how I should proceed.

Thanks!!!

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I believe, once you upgrade the internal drive you can no longer use the external.

I had a similar question...I've been experiencing the same problems as everyone else on this thread. I've got the Series 3 with OLED with the original 250GB internal and a 1TB Fantom Green Drive (GD1000EU) as an expansion. I tried the SMART test and it couldn't finish on the first drive. I assumed after reading through several threads that Unitron's suggestion to replace the drive according to Lussie/S3-2501 method would work. But how does the expansion drive come into play? I have a spare 2TB WD20EARS AF drive, looking for any advice on how I should proceed.

Thanks!!!

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You should be able to use that EARS as a replacement internal drive.

You could try copying the internal to it with

dd

or

ddrescue

or

dd_rescue

and trying that with the external still connected.

Of course that would only give you 250GB plus the size of the external, because a byte for byte "Xeroxing" like that would mean the 2TB would have the bootpage and partiton map of a 250.

Of course you could get another 250 (or larger) and "Xerox" to it from the 2TB.

In order to save your recordings, you're going to need to rescue what's on that internal.

That's assuming that only the internal is faulty.

What you need to do is find out what brand drive is inside that Fantom and run the manufacturer's diagnostic on it to make sure it's okay, and then run the manufacturer's diagnostic on the 250 (I assume WD) to see what it has to say about it, and while you've got the lid off of the TiVo check out the power supply for capacitor plague, since that's becoming fairly common in S2s and S3s.

I'm pretty sure that using an external means having to use an internal no larger than the original, or at least one on which only that much space is used, with a partition map that looks like the one on the original and doesn't show an Apple Free partition of unused space at the end.

You know, I assume, that each of your recordings is divvy'ed up between the internal and external, so that neither drive has the entire recording on it.

I get home, my new HD is waiting for me. I pull the old HD out of the TiVo and then realize I don't have any powered enclosures to power the drive after remembering 3.5" drives can't be powered by USB. So I cannabalize the My Book AV since I won't be using it. Took me a while to figure out how to get it recognized in my virtual machine and I was finally ready to go... start WinMFS it sees the drive and then tells me I need to divorce it from the external. :/ So back in the TiVo the drive goes, I boot it w/o the external and tell it I'm no longer going to use it. It does it's thing and reboots. I kill the power and go back to WinMFS. Now it starts the backup and fails right away. I check the info and it says it's not a TiVo drive.

Can you sense my frustration yet?

Back in the TiVo it goes and it won't boot back the "almost there" screen. So I reboot it and run a 57, it chugged away on that for a long time (I'm guessing something went amiss when it removed the external drive), but then it rebooted and it came back up. I was also surprised to still see a lot of my recordings. I even tried playing a few and they were really there. So I shut it down gracefully as I can (i.e. tell it to reboot and kill power when it cycles) and go back to WinMFS, it now can read the whole drive and partition info and most of all it successfully completed a backup. YAY!

While it was backing up I had the bright idea to run to Best Buy and pick up a second drive enclosure so I could attempt an mfscopy and not lose any of my recordings that I still had. Of course I get to BB and they have NO enclosures. All they had was a BlacX Duet which is a sata "tray" for two drives. So I buy that and go home. I've spent the last hour screwing with it and XP will not recognize it no matter what I do. So there was 2 hours wasted and I've got to bring it back tomorrow and figure out where I can actually buy an real enclosure.

I probably should just restore the backup and forget about it but if I can save those shows I'd like to.

Recordings you made before attaching the external should still be there.

Recordings made after attaching it may or may not show up as listings in Now Playing, but I've seen that happen with just an internal drive and what it was was like a table of contents where the pages after that were no longer there, even though there was still a table of contents that listed them.

After mine completely died, I called TiVo and they offered a replacement for $50 (exact model), so I took them up on it. The first one arrived dead, no power whatsoever. They immediately shipped out another one and I set it up yesterday.

So far so good, so if I can get another year or two out of it, it will be worth it to me.

Recordings you made before attaching the external should still be there.

Recordings made after attaching it may or may not show up as listings in Now Playing, but I've seen that happen with just an internal drive and what it was was like a table of contents where the pages after that were no longer there, even though there was still a table of contents that listed them.

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Yeah, I figured prior shows would be safe. I didn't have much and had watched/deleted the most recent stuff. There were 15 shows, all of which I had already watched, but was saving for some reason. I never watched them a second time since being recorded and I figured they are probably available online somewhere so I decided not to worry about them and just did a restore which is a little easier process and not having to use iBored. Restore took about 10 minutes vs the 1hr to backup.

Drive is in, booted clean first shot and I'm watching it now and it's already recording off my to-do list. Setting says I have 318HD or 2776SD hours, so I did something right.

Lets hope this is the last time I have to open that unit for a while, but...

I do need to do a soft reboot to make sure it comes back up as I didnt run wdidle on the drive, but others with the WD20EURS said it wasn't needed, we'll see. Hopefully I don't as it might be interesting using a virtual machine.

A few random thoughts:

- with the issue I had divorcing the drives it makes me wonder if my freeze then reboot weren't being caused by the external (that is after I fixed the caps)?
- this new drive is super quiet compared to the old one and that wasn't really noisy either.
- with the 2 old drives when a recording stopped or started (and I was also watching it live) there was a noticeable pause in the live watching, for maybe a good couple of seconds. Now with this new drive there is still a pause but it's pretty quick, more like a stutter.
- thanks for everyones help! Been a while since I had to do hardware work so I'm a bit out of practice.

edit: Just performed a soft reboot and it worked as expected w/o having to run wdidle.exe on the WD20EURS.

My Series 3 has started doing this tonight. I deleted the show (and cleaned out others). If it keeps happening I'm done with Tivo. My ROKU player streams just fine for free and if I can't find it there I wont watch it.

I'm really lament the loss of the old Tivo. You know-the company that actually cared about it's subscribers.

My Series 3 has started doing this tonight. I deleted the show (and cleaned out others). If it keeps happening I'm done with Tivo. My ROKU player streams just fine for free and if I can't find it there I wont watch it.

I'm really lament the loss of the old Tivo. You know-the company that actually cared about it's subscribers.

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You do know that "capacitor plague" hit almost the entire consumer electronics industry and not just TiVo, right?

And wasn't discovered until there were millions of bogus caps in the pipeline?

Just curious, if you care to comment on it, what was the time frame these capacitors hit the market and what other types of electronics could these capacitors be on?

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I recommend the wikipedia article on "capacitor plague".

I had a perfectly good Abit BX-6 (Pentium II/Celeron Slot 1) motherboard (which model was first released in mid-1998) I picked up used in late 2000 which fell victim.

Of course I didn't know that was the problem at the time, so I wasted a lot of time and energy.

I've had a few other motherboards with the same problem.

The LCD monitor in front of me I grabbed out of someone's front yard where they'd left it for the garbageman.

Bad caps in the power supply, one cap kit from lcdalternatives later, and I've got an HPvs17e for under $20.

Single layer boards, like LCD monitor/TV power supplies and TiVo power supplies, are easier to unsolder the bad caps and solder in the good ones than through holes on multilayer boards like computer motherboards.

Anything that uses electrolytic capacitors is probably at risk if made from the mid '90s on, although it's the ones subject to the most stress, like in switching power supplies or CPU power converters on motherboards, that are most likely to give the most trouble.

Technically, these days, it's not really capacitor plague - that was just a bunch of caps from a chinese company who tried to steal the formula of the electrolyte (the capacitors work because one of the plates has a very thin oxide layer - the other plate couples to the oxide layer through the electrolyte). I believe it really ended in the early 2000s or so.

Doesn't mean they don't fail - they are the worst components ever aside from mechanical ones. They's so bad, you're looking at tolerance (how close they meet their specified capacitance) of +50/-20%. And those cheap chinese caps? They're in business making caps still - companies like CapXon ("CrapXon") and the like. They're not as short-lived as they were with the poorly stolen formula, but they aren't as high quality as good quality Japanese ones are. They still do dry out and are equally questionable after a few years (they're normally rated for 2000 hours at rated temperature, and their life doubles with every 10C lower they're operated at).

Of course, cheap caps don't last as long and fade from usefulness far quicker than if they used those Nippon Chemi-Con or Panasonic or RubyCon style caps. Usually what happens is they lose their ESR - switching supplies require "low ESR" caps to operate and often the cheap ones have ESRs that go out of spec wildly (easily 10x - when they're supposed to have under an 10 ohms, they can easily end up over 200+ohms).

Unless TiVo's using NOS problem caps (most likely not - these things don't usually sit around), these failures are really due to the cheap caps failing because they're lousy parts.

Technically, these days, it's not really capacitor plague - that was just a bunch of caps from a chinese company who tried to steal the formula of the electrolyte (the capacitors work because one of the plates has a very thin oxide layer - the other plate couples to the oxide layer through the electrolyte). I believe it really ended in the early 2000s or so.

Doesn't mean they don't fail - they are the worst components ever aside from mechanical ones. They's so bad, you're looking at tolerance (how close they meet their specified capacitance) of +50/-20%. And those cheap chinese caps? They're in business making caps still - companies like CapXon ("CrapXon") and the like. They're not as short-lived as they were with the poorly stolen formula, but they aren't as high quality as good quality Japanese ones are. They still do dry out and are equally questionable after a few years (they're normally rated for 2000 hours at rated temperature, and their life doubles with every 10C lower they're operated at).

Of course, cheap caps don't last as long and fade from usefulness far quicker than if they used those Nippon Chemi-Con or Panasonic or RubyCon style caps. Usually what happens is they lose their ESR - switching supplies require "low ESR" caps to operate and often the cheap ones have ESRs that go out of spec wildly (easily 10x - when they're supposed to have under an 10 ohms, they can easily end up over 200+ohms).

Unless TiVo's using NOS problem caps (most likely not - these things don't usually sit around), these failures are really due to the cheap caps failing because they're lousy parts.

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We're talking about Series 2 and Series 3 power supplies, so it's a case of what TiVo's SUB-CONTRACTORS, who made the power supplies for them, WERE using, so it all took place after 2000, maybe 2002 to 2008, roughly.

Supposedly the incomplete formula was used at least as recently as 2007.

Also, the possibility of counterfeit capacitors exists. Anyone can print up a wrapper.

Interestingly enough, the only CapXon caps I've seen in TiVo supplies have been in the S2 DT supply, the 649 models, and that's the only S2 I have not heard of having power supply problems.

Did you, Mike, ever solve your reboot problem? Mine is starting to do it also but only occasionally so far. I'm running kickstart 54 as i type this. Your experience would be helpful, that is if you've learned anything other than what you've already posted here. Thanks

Interestingly enough, the only CapXon caps I've seen in TiVo supplies have been in the S2 DT supply, the 649 models, and that's the only S2 I have not heard of having power supply problems.

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I just replaced 10 caps in my OLED S3 yesterday. This S3 was ordered the day the S3 went on sale in 2006. Of the 10 replaced caps 4 of them were CapXon brand. The one bulging cap was one of those. I replaced another bad one 6 months ago and I'm certain that it was also a CapXon brand cap. So half the caps in my S3 were CapXon brand. The other caps were Ost brand, which are apparently also known to go bad.

My HDTCD652160 has been rebooting on it's own. I ran a "kickstart 54" with no error messages. I then opened it up and found 2 bulging disc which are shown in the attachment here. My questions to all you helpful folks are, where would I get those two capacitors and what would I ask for when I did find a place to get them. I will attempt to fix myself if it's not too complicated, which it doesn't appear to be, however I have no idea where to get them and what they are called. Or should I just buy a new power supply. Any and all advice welcome. Thanks

Attached Files:

My HDTCD652160 has been rebooting on it's own. I ran a "kickstart 54" with no error messages. I then opened it up and found 2 bulging disc which are shown in the attachment here. My questions to all you helpful folks are, where would I get those two capacitors and what would I ask for when I did find a place to get them. I will attempt to fix myself if it's not too complicated, which it doesn't appear to be, however I have no idea where to get them and what they are called. Or should I just buy a new power supply. Any and all advice welcome. Thanks

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That looks like the same power supply in my S3. There are a couple of lists of capacitors in this thread.